3 volumes in slipcase. Among the masterpieces of world literature, perhaps the least familiar to English readers is the Persian Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, the prodigious national epic of Iran, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between 980 and 1010 CE. It tells the story of Persia, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing up until the Arab-Islamic invasion in the seventh century. The epic has been brilliantly translated into a prosimetrum form, a combination of prose and verse, by the poet and pre-eminent Ferdowsi scholar Dick Davis. And breathtaking miniatures from the finest Persian Shahnameh manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from museums and private collections around the world, many of them published here for the first time, heighten the emotional impact of the text. These three volumes give English-language readers access to a world of vanished wonders. The origins of civilisation . . . the notion of kingship . . . tenderness, a longing for justice, and social order . . . the first kings felled by foolish pride . . . demons on the throne . . . spiritual heroes and their martial virtues . . . mythical birds . . . romance and passion -- these are some of the threads woven together to form the rich tapestry of ancient Persia. Ferdowsi was born in Khorasan in a village near Tus, in 940. His great epic, the Shahnameh, to which he devoted most of his adult life, was originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were the chief instigators of the revival of Persian cultural traditions after the Arab conquest of the seventh century. During Ferdowsi's lifetime this dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznavid Turks, and there are various stories in medieval texts describing their lack of interest in Ferdowsi and his lifework. Ferdowsi is said to have died around 1020 in poverty and embittered by royal neglect, though confident of his and his poem's ultimate fame.